The other day I calculated how much time I throw a year in the subway to go to work. How much of my existence is going to come and go and wait without seeing the sunlight, down there, 25 meters deep and 30 kilometers per hour.
Subtracting vacation time, the days when I can laziness and take the car or when I stay to write at home, the total figure is around 20 days a year.
Twenty whole days in just one year, don't believe it, with its 24 hours each. As if the entire Tour de France - from the exit to the Champs Elysees - you spend it sitting in a wagon of line one or making a transfer in Elliptical Square without ever leaving the surface.
That is why sometimes life asks you to get off at a station where you have never gotten off, go up a street that you have never stepped on, forget the destination and let the trains pass. So crowded and in a hurry.
You can be happy in your workplace, feel loved and want, put your feet on the writing table as in your living room. Only the body asks you to change posture and route for a short time.
You spend half your life looking for security and a fixed schedule and column and then there comes a time when the children have a mustache and have become accustomed to being buried in the subway.
Until 40 or so I think you don't find out something important: freedom is not about doing what you want. Freedom has more to do with refusing to do what one does not want to do.
(...)
Twenty days. 480 hours Almost 30,000 minutes ...
I am aware of the life I burn annually packed in the subway. And also of all that other time with light and without elbows that I have not calculated when I get to the newspaper. Because there are invaluable people that I leave for a while.
How many lessons a year the stories of the people who came to tell me add. How many days of therapy minutes with Elena or Amelia. How many international crises that Silvia has solved in my desserts. How many classes of humanity of Rafa and Antonio. How many adventures in that paper boat with Lucia, Iñako, Ana María, Sacri, José, Teresa, Rebe, Gonza, Jorge, Rodrigo and more ..
I get off the circular line for a while and then come back, family. Stay plural and incorrigible. Give your life if necessary so that no one takes the grilled chicken from the dining room. And do me one last favor: someone take care of watering the plants.
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